The Firefly Letters by Margarita Engle - Diversity

"Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common. Celebrate it every day."

This was a great book that focuses around three girls journey during the 1850’s to try and achieve freedom for themselves. Engle gives us different perspectives as it starts off with Fredrika who is the main character of the story, and then Elena, the daughter of the magistrate who is hosting Frederika, Cecilia who is the young slave and lastly, Beni who is Cecilia's husband. Through their journey in Cuba the reader can see how three very different girls break the walls of language and cultures to become friends with each other, helping one another grow in the process! A great message for all of this books readers to benefit from J

Reading Level: 4.4

Readers: Below are a few websites that could assist in the learning and teaching of this book!

- This would be a good website to use in the classroom to help explain to students how back 100/200 years ago, women did not have as many freedoms as men. This website would be able to describe the women’s movement and would be a great pre-teaching website to use in a lesson before reading the book.

 - This is also a good website to use with your students as it can be a review of what they learned after reading the book. It has different questions along with a summary which can help keep them on tract!

Vocabulary:

Activities:

Pre Reading:

The teacher and students can talk about what rights and privileges everyone has now-a-days and how that wasn’t always the case for those who lived before us. The website that I listed above would be a good reference to use in this discussion!

During Reading:

Students will independently read and write down different liberties that they see Fredrika and the other characters not have that they have today (this can then lead into the after reading activity.)

After Reading:

Students can choose two or three of the freedoms that they noticed didn’t exist “back in the day” and research how they came to be freedoms that they have. This would be a great learning experience for the students and could cross over to be used as a history lesson as well!

Engle, M. (2010). The firefly letters: a suffragette's journey to Cuba. New York: Henry Holt And Co..